WJEC/Eduqas RS for A2/Yr2: Religion and Ethics (DRAFT)

T4

Determinism and free will

This section covers AO1 content and skills Specification content Religious concepts of free will.

D: Religious concepts of free will Religious concepts of free will: an introduction As with every Specification there has to be some kind of breaking down and splitting up of material for study. In a sense, this is quite alien to how Academic study works. The study of philosophy, for example, involves a study of logical thought processes in order to establish a sense of truthfulness to material studied. We come across key terms such as empirical, realist, materialist, naturalist and so forth but really it is not as neat as we would like because within each term there is further philosophical debate as to what precisely that term may entail. As a result, different philosophers end up being labelled as specific types of empiricists or materialists. The same is true of theology that attempts to ‘box’ and ‘categorise’ different understandings of God in order to clarify specific positions taken. The whole course you are studying involves an overlap between philosophy and theology by the very nature of being titled The Philosophy of Religion . This, too, brings further complications because philosophers and theologians do not always use the same language, approach or methods of analysis. You will have seen this especially in the sections on Finnis and Hoose. One of the best bits of advice that the present author could offer to any student of philosophy, theology or religious studies is to appreciate the vast richness and diversity of thought, perspectives and approaches that these academic disciplines involve. In order to remember this perhaps we always need to question what is given, and in particular, ask ourselves, ‘ Is this view, theory or argument presented really as clear-cut as it may appear? ’ In terms of the study of determinism and free will in Theme 4 we have already seen variety in the approaches to the issues of the theological ideas related to determinism as presented by Augustine and Calvin. However, we must make an important point here and acknowledge that predestination is not the same as determinism. Firstly, one term is philosophical and the other theological. Determinism covers all human actions; predestination can refer to just human ‘destination’ (i.e. salvation or not) and not necessarily the path along the way. Certainly in the case of Augustine we have already noted that the issues of predestination are not always straightforward; therefore, this raises the question as to whether or not the juxtaposition of free will and predestination is also as clear- cut? We shall see that there are a variety of positions taken on this. The philosophy in Theme 4 is a little clearer in that we look at determinism (more specifically, predestination) and free will from an ethical perspective. However, there is also a rich tradition of debate within philosophy that involves what are termed compatibilists , that is, those philosophers who feel that the debate between free will and determinism is not at all clear-cut and that there is some merit in exploring views and arguments that suggest the two polarities of debate may actually have some middle ground. Although this is not really studied in depth, it does rear its head in the debate about soft and hard determinism. It is this compatibilist approach to an issue that will help us to make sense of this section on religious ideas about free will and their implications for religious belief.

DRAFT O O

We often like to categorise concepts into neat boxes but sometimes it is not as easy as that.

Key term Compatabilist: the view that one theory does not contradict another (i.e. a person can both have free will and be determined)

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